*Picture 1:

A dying star on the verge of exploding creates a cosmic "butterfly" in a picture from the Wide Field Camera 3--a new camera installed in May during the Hubble Space Telescope's final servicing mission. The Hubble team released some of the first pictures taken by the upgraded telescope in September.

Known as a planetary nebula, this structure lies roughly 3,800 light-years away. Optical filters in the space telescope allowed astronomers to precisely determine the nebula's chemical makeup, temperature, and density, and to trace the stages of the star's demise.

The central star, now obscured by a dense band of dust, was once five times the mass of the sun. Over the past two thousand years the star has expelled most of its outer gas envelope to create the ghostly "wings," which together span about two light-years.

*Picture 2:
In June scientists with the Chandra X-ray Observatory released this picture of a shock wave plowing through the supernova remnant RCW 86, seen above in both x-ray and visible light. Although the shock wave is moving rapidly, its energy is not heating the surrounding gas as much as it should, scientists say. The new image shows that the extra energy is instead powering up particles and firing them out into space at nearly the speed of light.